A Night in Sickbay
'' |image= |series= |production=40358-030/205 |producer(s)= |story= |script= Rick Berman and Brannon Braga |director= David Straiton |imdbref=tt0572172 |guests=Vaughn Armstrong as Kreetassan Captain |previous_production=Minefield |next_production=Dead Stop |episode=ENT S02E05 |airdate=16 October 2002 |previous_release=Dead Stop |next_release=Marauders |story_date(s)=Unknown (2152) |previous_story=Dead Stop |next_story=Marauders }} =Summary= After a five-day away mission spent apologising on the planet Kreetassa, the away team consisting of Captain Archer, Sub-Commander T'Pol, Ensign Sato, and Archer's dog, Porthos, return to the ship to decontaminate. Porthos has acquired a pathogen on the planet surface and must be quarantined. Archer learns from Commander Tucker of the ship's need for an extra plasma injector from the Kreetassans, but negotiations break down after it is discovered that Porthos had urinated on a sacred tree, insulting the Kreetassans. Archer reacts poorly to the news and is given a list of requirements he must meet in order to apologise. He and Doctor Phlox then tend to Porthos, and Archer spends the night in Sickbay to be with his pet. Throughout the night, as Porthos' immune system weakens, Archer experiences Phlox's side of life in Sickbay. During the night, as he dreams of Porthos' funeral, Archer also deals with unresolved and suppressed sexual tension with T'Pol. He also relates to Phlox how he met Porthos, and how he was the last in a litter of four male puppies, the 'Four Musketeers'. Through it all, Archer struggles to reach an emotional understanding with Phlox and T'Pol, as the two alien senior-crew members have little grasp of the human-pet relationship, and Phlox keeps offering Archer unsolicited advice about dealing with his apparent feelings for T'Pol. T'Pol, working out in the gym, also keeps urging Archer to apologize to the Kreetassans for Porthos' behavior, but Archer resists because he blames them for Porthos' illness. In the end, Porthos recovers following a pituitary transplant from an alien chameleon. Finally swallowing his pride, Archer then goes down to the Kreetassan capital and delivers an intricate ritual apology which involves slicing a tree trunk with a chainsaw, arranging the pieces of wood in a complex pattern on the ground, and chanting phrases in the Kreetassan language. Having successfully apologised to the Kreetassans, the crew finally manage to procure three plasma injectors prior to their departure. =Errors and Explanations= Nit Central # SMT on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 7:28 pm: Just days ago, a few weeks at the most, Enterprise visited a repair station that fixed every tiny problem the ship had, down to scratches on the hull and squeaks in the deck. Why did it not detect and fix the plasma injector that was about to start acting up? Electron on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 9:53 pm: Maybe the injector was damaged when the Enterprise escaped from the exploding station. LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 11:43 pm: How could a component deep inside Engineering be damaged by explosions outside the ship? D.W. March on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 1:52 am: My theory is that it did indeed take some severe strain as Enterprise was escaping the station. And as to how a component so deep inside the ship could be so easily damaged... it is something that presumably regulates the flow of superheated gas to the engines. It was under extreme stress on account of the ship trying to pull away from a station that didn't want to let go. For a practical if somewhat expensive demonstration, kick your computer over while the hard drive is running full out. Be prepared to replace hard drive a week later!' # It's little more than one shipboard hour between the time the Kretassans send their demands and the time the Kretassan jerk (I believe that is his official title) demands to know Archer's response. He says, IIRC, that three hours have passed. (Of course, maybe they're Kretassan hours, but time units usually translate to the human variety, don't they?) LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 10:34 pm: It’s actually about two and a half. Act 2 -12:09am Archer enters the gym. He then goes the bridge directly from the gym to get the Kreetassan demands. He then leaves the bridge. -1:32am Archer then wakes up in sickbay when Porthos undergoes anaphylactic shock. He and Phlox treat him. Archer goes to sleep. -The Kreetassan captain speaks to Hoshi, in which he claims that nearly three hours and passed, and suggests the Enterprise synchronize itself to the Kreetassan capital city’s time. There is no time caption for this scene. -In the closing scene of Act 2, Archer wakes up to the sound of Phlox trying to catch his bat. In the opening scene of Act 3, Archer and Phlox try to catch her, and Archer mentions that it’s 2:30am. Hoshi arrives in sickbay to relay the message. So it’s from about 12:09am to 2:30am. Therefore, assuming there might’ve been some rounding off on Archer’s part when he said "2:30", the Kreetassan captain was not too far off when he said it was "nearly three hours." ''' # And how do the Kretassans know what time it is on Enterprise, anyway? ''Josh M on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 10:14 pm:'' Something like this: Kreetassen guy calls the Enterprise in the middle of the afternoon. Hoshi answers. The Kreetassen demands to know where Archer is. Hoshi says that he's trying to sleep because it's the middle of the night on the ship. At this point, we see the rest of the scene.' # Archer has a couple of involved dreams, and wakes up at 2:49 am. Thing is, hadn't he just gotten back to sleep somewhere around 2:30, according to another caption. The human REM cycle lasts around 90 minutes, and dreams come at the end of it. Nineteen minutes probably wasn't enough time for Archer to start dreaming. 'Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 4:52 am: I'd say it was possible. I've had dreams in short periods of sleep. Especially when I've had trouble sleeping. Can't say for certain if any happened in less than 19 minutes, but I have fallen asleep, had a dream, woke up & looked at the clock to discover that it's about 30 minutes from when I last looked at the clock. (Very annoying.) LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: Come to think of it, I’ve experienced a state when was sleepy but trying to stay awake, and was actually drifting between wakefullness and dreaming! This actually happened once to me in high school during algebra or geometry class. (No, I’m not joking, it actually happened). Funny how it didn’t occur to me until now.' # Why wouldn't Phlox, with all the alarms he hooked up to Porthos, have known that the dog's pituitary gland was disintegrating before it was virtually gone? Isn't a disintegrating gland the kind of thing that should, well, alarm you? '''The sensors may not have picked it up straight away.' # So Phlox uses Archer as his assistant during a surgical procedure he has never performed before. This is what got me asking, where is Cutler, or any other crewmember trained as a medical assistant? roger on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 8:28 pm: Phlox has Archer help because it gives Archer something to do. He couldn't sleep anyway. But Cutler should have been in attendance anyway, but maybe she and the other assistants needed some time off, from doing too much overtime in Sickbay already. (With all the injuries from two episodes ago...) # Archer says Phlox has been away from home for over two years. He can't mean on this mission, which has lasted barely over one. Perhaps Phlox was on Earth for a year before joining the crew, and Archer would know this from his record (which would show Archer being a good captain). Phlox was serving on Earth, as part of the Medical Exchange Programme, when Archer recruited him in Broken Bow. # By the time captions, it's around six hours between Porthos's surgery and the time Archer takes him home. Phlox says there are no signs of rejection symptoms. Is that enough time to know? Rejection can take days, even weeks, in human surgeries. LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 11:43 pm: You’re absolutely right, but the only because the episode title and captions indicate in general that it takes place over the course of one day. We have no indication of the time between the surgery and the final sickbay scene because the latter has no time caption. Although the scene right before it with him and T’Pol in the ready room was at 9:15am, there is no indication that the sickbay scene is necessarily right after it. # LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 9:02 pm: The bizarre scale concerning Trek officials continues. The Kreetassan character from Vox Sola and this episode is listed in credits as the Kreetassan "captain." But why is the Enterprise’s Kreetassan contact when visiting their home planet a starship captain? Shouldn’t it be the president or an ambassador? Perhaps he was ordered to handle the call due to his prior contact with Enterprise in Vox Sola. # Josh M on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 10:14 pm: What about all of the other planets that they have visited? Is there any reason why the away teams could not have contaminated those planets? I hope that there is some way for them to prevent themselves from taking foreign organisms to other planets. Otherwise, there really shouldn't be any exploring without some kind of special suits. LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 11:43 pm: Episodes featuring the decon room like Broken Bow, Sleeping Dogs and Acquisition seemed to indicate that they get scanned in the decon room every time they visit an unknown planet or ship’s environment. Of course, I’d like to know how they get from the Launch Bay to the decon room without infecting the Enterprise’s atmosphere. Seniram 10:27, October 17, 2018 (UTC) There could be a dedicated walkway. # LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 10:34 pm: During the surgery in the beginning of Act 4, Phlox inserts the pituitary gland into the incision on Porthos’ head and then asks for the auto-suture. Doesn’t he have to attach it to whatever it’s supposed to be attached to before sewing up the incision? Perhaps the auto suture is to attach the gland. # Trike on Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 11:57 pm: Did Phlox sacrifice a live animal in order to transplant its pituitary gland to Porthos? I wonder if I misunderstood what happened, because if that were so, it would be a huge infraction of medical ethics. So big that I think Phlox wouldn’t be allowed to practice anymore. LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 12:27 am: How do you figure this? Using animals in medical research has a long history. Babboon organs have been transplanted into humans. As a scientist, Phlox knows this. # Phlox tells Archer he needs 5 ccs of the blue fluid, but the fluid’s color could not be seen through its container. LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 12:27 am: Good observation. Moreover, Phlox tells him that it's the second one on the right, but the container is lying in the center of the counter, not on the shelf, but Archer seems to know it's that one anyway. # Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 4:52 am: I found it odd that Phlox refered to a creature from his own planet as a "Denobulan lemur". Doesn't it have a name in the Denobulan language? Couldn't Phlox have said something like, 'The sxcrrah, similar to the Earth lemur.'? LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: Well, I believe Phlox speaks English on the Enterprise, so it makes sense he’d use a Terran approximation. They do this all the time in Trek: The Arbazon "vulture" in The Search Part 2 (DS9), the Tiberian "bats" in ST VI, etc. TomM on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 4:35 pm: But in all those cases, even when the speaker and the "audience" were from different planets, the animal was from a third. A better example would be Journey to Babel (TOS), when Amanda mentions Spock's Sehlat, and then describes it as sort of a teddy-bear. # Amazing that no one who stayed in Sickbay ever complained about all these odd noises before. LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: We’ve never seen anyone else staying in sickbay past the end of an episode fading to black, so we don’t know if they did or didn’t. # KAM on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 5:54 am: The way Hoshi catches the bat, wouldn't that hurt the animal? Flying straight into a hand, *thud*, doesn't seem like the most pleasant way to come to a stop. LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: Perhaps Pyrithian bats have reinforced noses? :) # TJFleming on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 7:44 am: What were T'Pol and Archer beeping up on the treadmills? There was no discernible increase in speed or elevation, but Archer wimped out in a surprisingly short time. More gravity? Less oxygen? LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: It seemed pretty obvious that it was the speed. Sure it was hard to discern because the creators didn’t show us them below the waist. # Anonymous on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 11:59 am: How could Dr. Phlox claim not to have a pet when he has all those creatures in sickbay? Rene on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 12:16 pm: Well, they are apparently there for medical purposes. How often did we see Phlox use one of them to treat a member of the crew? TomM on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 2:44 pm: That was what he claimed in the pilot, but we have seen him treat the bat differently than all the other animals...LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, October 17, 2002 - 3:57 pm: How so? He presumably keeps her there because of some bodily fluid she secretes. Category:EpisodesCategory:Enterprise